EA wants to bring Apex Legends to mobile

Today EA released its quarterly earnings, and unsurprisingly Apex Legends was a big hit. According to EA, the Respawn-developed battle royale game is “easily the fastest-growing franchise we’ve ever had.” What might be surprising, though, is that EA said it’s looking to bring the game from PC and console to mobile platforms. “We are in advanced negotiations to bring Apex Legends to China and to mobile,” the company said during today’s call.

Unfortunately, that’s all the information we have right now. But clearly EA is looking to keep pace with Apex’s biggest competitors, Fortnite and PUBG. Both of those games are available on mobile, though they utilize different strategies. Fortnite is essentially the exact same experience across all platforms, including mobile, while PUBG has a separate version called PUBG Mobile. Both games are massive hits; as of last December, the mobile version of PUBG had as many players as all of Fortnite, at around 200 million.

There’s no word on when this might happen for Apex, nor what form the mobile iteration will take. But it appears that EA is trying hard to keep the game’s early momentum going. “We are hugely excited about the future of Apex Legends,” the company said today.

Last month Respawn said that it planned to keep updating the game with seasonal updates, “with a focus on quality of content over novelty or speed of release.” This followed reports of crunch and extreme overtime at Fortnite developer Epic, which updates at an incredibly fast rate. “We want to maintain our culture as a development team and avoid crunch that can quickly lead to burnout or worse,” Apex executive producer Drew McCoy said at the time.